seasignals

Purpose

seasignals is being developed to support reproducible representation of large-scale ocean–climate variability in marine ecological and fisheries analyses. Its initial focus is on converting climate indices into interpretable descriptors of phase, magnitude, persistence, and transition.

Scientific problem

Marine populations may respond differently to weak, moderate, and extreme environmental conditions, and those responses can depend on whether the system is entering, persisting in, or leaving a climate phase. Analyses based only on raw index values may not represent that temporal structure explicitly.

Planned capabilities

• Classify climate phases using transparent and reproducible rules.
• Quantify event magnitude and persistence.
• Detect transitions among warm, neutral, and cold conditions.
• Generate analysis-ready time-series features for ecological models.
• Support sensitivity analysis for alternative thresholds and definitions.
• Produce standardized summaries and visual diagnostics.

Intended applications

• ENSO and coastal ocean variability.
• Recruitment and population-dynamics studies.
• Habitat and species-distribution models.
• Pressure–state and threshold analyses.
• Fisheries and ecosystem indicators.

Development status

Active development. The package structure, functions, documentation, testing framework, and public repository are being prepared. A stable release, license, citation file, and versioned documentation will be added when the package is ready for external use.

Reproducibility principles

The package is intended to use explicit definitions, documented assumptions, unit tests, versioned releases, and examples based on public or synthetic data.

Related work

See Environmental variability and ecosystem responses and Reproducible marine data systems.